Libya’s rebel leader with a past

Post-Gaddafi Libya cannot move on until its militia disarms. Abdel Hakim Belhadj, a returned jihadist from Afghanistan, heads the Tripoli Military Council. Can he be a stabilising force?

by Vicken Cheterian

Mitiga airport, east of Tripoli, is now the headquarters of the Tripoli Military Council, the forces loyal to the National Transition Council (NTC) that overthrew Muammar Gaddafi and took over Tripoli. The head of the Tripoli Military Council is Abdel Hakim Belhadj, known as “the sheikh”, and many people want to meet him.

There has been speculation about Belhadj from the time the rebels entered Tripoli, and people wonder what he really represents. For those in the West who opposed Nato participation in Libya, he is proof that it was wrong to support the rebellion. The Gaddafi regime had claimed to be fighting al-Qaida — and Belhadj’s appearance at the entrance of Bab al-Aziziya, Gaddafi’s compound, gave a little credence to that.

“The sheikh” has been in the news again. With his wife Fatima Bouchar, he has brought a legal action against the British government, including the former foreign secretary Jack Straw, for complicity in handing him over to Gaddafi’s police in 2004 (1). Belhadj claims he was tortured as he was being transferred through Diego Garcia, and again by Libyan security after he was handed over to the Gaddafi regime.

Belhadj’s story began in 1988 when he joined the Afghan mujahedin fighting the Soviet army. In the early 1990s, after the mujahedin entered Kabul, he returned to Libya and, with other “Arab Afghans”, founded the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), to topple the Gaddafi regime. In 1996 he became the group’s amir or commander (2). But as the LIFG militants clashed with Gaddafi’s forces, its bases in the Green Mountains in the east (where the Libyan hero Omar Mukhtar had once fought the Italians) were napalmed by warplanes. After three failed assassination attempts on Gaddafi, those militants who survived returned to Afghanistan.

The US invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11 dispersed the LIFG fighters yet again. Belhadj was arrested by CIA agents (the result of information from the UK while he was travelling through Malaysia). He was tortured, handed over to the Libyan authorities, and imprisoned in Abu Slim prison for seven years. He was released in 2009. But his detention, as well as his time in Afghanistan, made people associate him with al-Qaida.

‘With us or against us?’

9/11 brought a new challenge: the world would have to decide, as President George W Bush put it, whether it was “either with us [the US] or against us”. The LIFG was faced with a choice: should the armed struggle to which they all subscribed be global, or should it be directed to its own local environment? Divided over this, the group split. Part of the LIFG refused to join the war against the “far enemy” (the US and Europe) and limited the struggle to fighting Gaddafi. They included Belhadj, its amir, and Noman Bin Othman, the group’s most visible figure who lived in London.

Those who disagreed — and remained in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region — were integrated into al-Qaida, and provided Osama bin Laden with key jihadi leaders such as Abu Yahya al-Libi (a key al-Qaida figure who escaped from Bagram prison in Afghanistan in 2005). Two years later Bin Laden’s number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, claimed that the LIFG had joined al-Qaida, increasing confusion over the LIFG and its goals.

There was a third group: the hundreds of LIFG militants who were detained in Libyan prisons, where they concluded that their attempt to overthrow Gaddafi’s regime by armed revolt had failed. Watching the development of jihadi insurgency in Algeria or Egypt would have led them to the same conclusion, that the Arab regimes that had the support of global powers were too strong to be overthrown by guerrilla warfare or terrorism.

These militants were released in three waves from 2009, with the last group of 110 being freed on 16 February 2011 (the day the revolt exploded in Benghazi). Among them was Abdel Wahab Qayed, the brother of Abu Yahya al-Libi. Two people played a key role in the release of the LIFG prisoners: Seif al-Islam Gaddafi, presented as the reformist face of his father’s regime, and Sheikh Ali al-Sallabi, a Libyan Muslim Brotherhood leader. Immediately after the release of the last LIFG prisoners, they launched the Islamic Movement for Change (al-haraka al-islamiya lil-taghyir), which aimed at a peaceful transformation of the Libyan political scene. The former LIFG militants and the Muslim Brotherhood are now collaborating to launch a new national political entity — while elsewhere in the region relations between the Brotherhood and Salafist-jihadi groups are poor, even hostile.

‘Libyans know my history’

Despite this evolution of the LIFG, Belhadj now faces criticism: many of the former Libyan rebels call him the “Al-Jazeera commander” because of his appearance on Qatari television screens during the battle for Tripoli, and criticise his links with the Gulf monarchy.

Belhadj was willing to talk to me. He was soft spoken, seemed modest, and produced official documents to back up what he said. He talked of the part he had played in the revolution: “My role was not limited to the liberation of Tripoli. On 18 February I went to Misrata and met the shabab [youth], and next day I was in Zawiyat Sabrata to meet the rebels. Then I went underground, fearing security would come after me. And that is what happened: they arrested my father and my brother. For six weeks I hid in various places in Tripoli, collecting money, preparing safe houses and contacting youth with military experience to get out of Tripoli.”

He left Tripoli by boat for Tunisia in April, where he met rebels, then moved to Benghazi to help set up the February 17 Battalion (led by Fawzi Abu Katef, from Benghazi). On 14 July he received an order by the defence minister of the National Transitional Council to transport arms and ammunition to the western region where, after many battles, he took part in the liberation of Tripoli. “What concerns my history, the Libyans know. I did not come down from the sky. My past struggle goes back to the 1980s.”

Belhadj explained his Salafist and jihadi ideology: “A human being positions himself in reality. We did not carry arms against the Libyan people: we were part of, and an extension of, the people. We carried the banner of jihad to convince them of the idea of jihad to end the rule of Gaddafi. We did not propose a complete political idea; the accent was on armed struggle as the means of bringing change.”

Anes al-Sharif was also a member of the LIFG and spent years in the UK doing media work for the group; he is now a close collaborator with Belhadj. He said the LIFG’s problem was its attempt, before the revolution, to “try to change the regime by force; it failed because it was the project of one group, and people feared they would exchange one minority rule for another. The Arab Spring shows that the people themselves brought change, and it is their right to rule. The Arab Spring rejects the idea that a new group comes to power to stay. The fact that peaceful means were not enough on their own to bring change in Libya confirms that the [eventual] choice of armed struggle was not a mistake.”

Belhadj confirmed this view and talked of the current Arab uprisings: “What distinguishes them is their popular nature. In regrouping in a simple organisation we did not succeed. What we want now is the success of the goals of the Arab revolutions, which are genuine democracy, elections, rule of law, building of institutions, and equality.”

A conservative society

Libya’s population is largely Sunni (95% of Libyans follow the Malikite rite) and it is a conservative society. There is consensus on sharia as the reference for jurisprudence, and on the role of women: even those who disagree are not demanding that they have a public role. Alcohol was and still is illegal. Unlike Egypt and Tunisia, Libya has no serious tourism industry that could make cultural differences problematic. Nor is there the Islamist-secular divide evident in Tunisia.

Not everyone in Libya is convinced by the declarations of the former Islamist activists. A Libyan political observer, who wanted to be anonymous, wondered if the change in the LIFG was genuine, saying he had information about intensive contacts between the Syrian opposition and “some groups in Libya”, presumably the former LIFG (3).

There are rumours in Tripoli that Belhadj has sent arms, money and fighters to Syria and met Syrian militants in Turkey, where the Syrian opposition is gathered (4). I asked him about his visit to Istanbul last November. He claimed it was related purely to the Libyan war wounded being treated in Turkish hospitals: “I did not take money or weapons with me, and during my 48-hour stay I did not meet with Syrians.” But rumours persist. On 28 April Reuters reported the seizure in Lebanon of a 150-ton consignment of arms, part of it from Libya, destined for Syria.

Even so, the rules of the political game, in Libya and the region, changed in 2011. Today, within Libya, Islamist rebels do not need to carry weapons to claim their share in politics — as shown by Belhadj and his friends, who took power with the popular revolt and a little help from Nato. Their problem now is exercising power. For, whatever anyone’s political convictions, politics is the reflection of real forces on the ground.

Because of pressure from the Misrata and Zintan fighters, the transitional government did not include leading Islamists in its first cabinet, including Belhadj, whom some thought would become defence minister. In Tripoli he faces competition from the head of the Tripoli Revolutionary Council headed by Abdullah Naker, a close ally of defence minister Osama al-Juwayli, both from the influential Zintan rebels.

As the old jihadi militants are trying to integrate into Libya’s new political scene, a younger generation is becoming radicalised, and could regard al-Qaida as an ideological model. In March a military procession of 30 vehicles armed with heavy machine guns, flying the black flag of al-Qaida, worried observers. There were assassinations in the eastern city of Darnah, also attributed to underground jihadi militants, which targeted officials accused of collaboration with the old regime.

Will the old generation of jihadis represented by Belhadj, who are now trying to play a public, legal role in Libya, be able to limit radicalisation? Should they fail, a new generation of more militant Islamists might appear.